One Drop At a Time
by La Guera
Summary: Sometimes the end comes when you least expect it, and those left behind learn that acceptance isn't always salvation. An SLS AU


One Drop At A Time

_My heart is big and sore_

_Trying to push right through my skin_

_Won't see you anymore_

_Think it's finally sinking in._

Martina McBride-"Goodbye"

Disclaimer:  All recognizable places, characters, and the environs of Hogwarts belong to J.K. Rowling and Warner Brothers, Inc.  I do not own them.  For entertainment only.  "Goodbye" is property of Martina McBride and RCA Records and its subsidiary, TwangThis.

     She sat in the middle of the room, her hands matted in her hair, fingers tugging compulsively at the thin golden strands.  This was the first place she had thought to come when Dumbledore told her the news.  She hadn't even waited for him to finish; she had simply spun her chair away from him and fled down the corridor, hair trailing behind her like the tail of a defiant comet.

     It was cold in here, bitterly cold, and her breath plumed before her eyes in a misty, amorphous cloud that faded even as it formed.  It had never been so frigid before, so brutally glacial, but she didn't mind.  In fact, she embraced it gladly.  Maybe it would make her numb, anesthetize her to the clawing agony that started in the soles of her feet and writhed in every nerve ending, strangling them in an unforgiving deathgrip.  She wrapped her arms around her shoulders and shivered.  Her teeth chattered helplessly, clicking like marbles inside her mouth.

     She wouldn't believe it.  That was the one thing they couldn't make her do.  They could make her study, could make her sit her lessons, make her treat McGonagall with a respect she didn't deserve.  Winky could drag her from bed and make her comb her hair and brush her teeth.  Winky could treat her as a living doll as she pleased.  She was accustomed to it, after all.  But try as they might, they would never be able to make her believe that Professor Snape was dead.

     _He wouldn't.  He wouldn't._  She began to rock in rhythm with the thought, slowly, ferociously, lunging forward and jerking back again, her lip curled in an unconscious snarl.  Her nails dug into the goosepimpled flesh of her biceps, and she started, surprised by the sudden warmth of blood trickling down her arm.  She drew her hand away, looked at the bright red smears of blood there, and then replaced it, digging deeper still.

     Pain was good.  It would recalibrate the balance between mind and body.  Outside matching the inside.  She gasped, the icy air scorching her lungs.  The awful weight was still massed inside her chest, crouching there like a patient animal.  Well, it was going to be there for a long damn time.  To let it out would be to concede defeat, to _believe_, and she refused to do that.  She would never be so faithless.  She knew better.  _He _had taught her better.

     Dumbledore and his stories of a sneak attack while the Professor was at the apothecary's could go to hell.  It wasn't so.  People who had survived six ambushes and a prolonged captivity did not get hexed in the back while waiting for the doddering proprietor to make their change.  They did not slump over the counter in a lifeless heap of puritanical black, spilling the contents of their shopping bag across the floor and gasping their last into a tin of dried doxy dung.  It was undignified.  It wasn't done, not in any sane world.  Besides, the war was almost over.  Dumbledore himself had told her so just a week past.

     No, Professor Snape wasn't dead.  He couldn't die.  He had thwarted his enemies a thousand times.  If someone had been lying in wait for him, he would have sensed them, seen them from the corners of his keen onyx eyes or smelled them with his even keener nose.  He was always prepared, always ready.  That was the first thing he'd taught her when it had become apparent that war was imminent.

_     Be prepared, you silly girl,_ she heard him say._  Enemies could be anywhere._

_     Then his own wand had come up and struck her with _Petrificus Totalus_, and she had stared at him in wounded, lockjaw disbelief.  He had looked down at her for a long time, his eyes glittering, and when he had released her from the Curse, he had calmly stepped over her and said, "Anyone."  Lesson learned.  She had never forgotten it._  And if she had not forgotten, then neither had he.  No, he was alive and well, and he would be back soon, sweeping into the room in a billow of magisterial black and snarling at her to stop dawdling and get to work.  He would come.

     But Dumbledore had seemed so sincere.  Those kindly blue eyes had lost their merry twinkle, had been bereft of hope, of light.  In truth, they had looked much like the eyes of the Professor, bleak and dying, bottomless pits of despair.  She shivered at the memory of them.  And when he had reached out to touch her shoulder, to steady her, to offer sparse comfort, his hand had been graceless, heavy as wet stone.  She had recoiled from it, realizing intuitively that it had never felt that way before, and then she had fled, shunning the message that burdened it.

     _Why would Dumbledore tell you such a lie, be so needlessly cruel?  He wouldn't.  You know he wouldn't._

_     I don't believe it._

_     Then why are you fighting so hard?_

"I don't believe it," she called to the empty room, defying its sepulchral emptiness, its silence.

     _Yes, you do._

     The simple surety of the thought infuriated her.  Tears prickled her eyes, and she took great gulps of frozen, air.  The weight inside her chest was crushing, and her lungs struggled against it, throbbing with the effort.  She threw her head back and snapped it forward again, trying to dislodge the lump in her throat, a throat that was suddenly two sizes too small.

     "I don't!  I don't!" she hissed.  "Never."

     _Yes, you do._

     She had to drive the traitorous thought from her mind.  She rolled to the desk.  

     _The desk where the Professor should be sitting._

     But the chair behind it was unoccupied, and the sight of its hard mahogany back unobscured by a black robe and a stern, sallow face shattered her restraint.  "I don't!" she screamed, and seized the hourglass on the edge of the desk.  She hurled it across the room with a grunt.

     It exploded against the far wall in a shower of powdery sand and twinkling glass.  One small shard rebounded and sliced her cheek, but she merely batted it away with an impatient snort.  It was unimportant.  The only thing that mattered now was purging herself of this blasphemous thought and the ravenous anger devouring her from the inside out.

     Over and over again, she reached for things, and over and over again, they shattered against the killing wall, their prismatic corpses sliding down the wall in a merry scream, ceding their souls in all the colors of the rainbow.  Jars.  Phials.  Scales.  One by one, they fell to her grasping hands, and yet the rancid weight of her anger did not lessen, was not sated by the sacrifice of glass or the ritual slaughter of her mentor's beloved order.

     She was halfway through his alphabetized common stores when it struck her.  She had just tossed a jar of mummified Puffskeins across the room with a frantic "I don't I don't I don't," when she realized he was not there.  She had destroyed half his stores and made a noise fit to rouse the dead while doing so.  He should have arrived in a tower of righteous wrath, eyes flashing as he roared at her to stop, and in his wake should have been the overpowering scent of allspice and parchment dust.  The voice of God should be ringing in her ears.

     But the voice of God was silent, and the smells of allspice and parchment dust were vague and stale, faded imitations of the truth.  She grasped for them in the close air of the closet and tried to bring them to her nose, but they slipped through her fingers.

     "Professor?" she called, her voice unsteady with dawning truth.  "Professor Snape, I need you."

     She waited, but there came no impatient footfalls.  No stern, inscrutable face appeared in the doorway, no irascible voice asking what on earth was wrong with her, couldn't she see he was working reached her ears.

     "Professor!  Help me."

     Only silence.

     She screamed then, as loudly as she could.  It didn't matter who heard as long as he did.  She screamed with all the force she could muster, screamed like a terrified child, and when he still did not come, when there was no answering voice, she knew.  He was a bastard, but he always came when she needed him.  Even a fool could have seen that she needed him now, needed more than she ever had before.  And he was not here.

     The terrible knot in her chest loosened, and when it was gone, a howl erupted from her throat.  It was an animal sound of betrayal, of loss, of an agony so deep it twisted her bones and crushed her heart inside her chest.  She screamed mindlessly, blindly, without end.  She screamed because to not scream would mean her death.  She would drown, suffocate on her raw, insufferable grief.

     _Damn you.  Damn you!  How could you?  You weren't supposed to go._

     Footsteps in the hall.  Hurried.  Frightened.  Filch, maybe.  Or Dumbledore.  Doubtless they were coming to save her.  She snarled as she screamed and sobbed.  She wouldn't let them.  She would claw their eyes out if they tried to touch her.  There was nothing they could do, nothing they could say to put her to rights again.

     Besides, it was too late.  She could feel her life ebbing away with every passing moment.  She was already bleeding to death, one drop at a time. 


End file.
